Thursday, September 30, 2010

Google Translate goes Latin

In news that will be welcomed by many medieval and ancient history scholars, Google Translate has added Latin to its list of languages that can be automatically translated to other languages. The website announced the news today in a post written in Latin, entitled “Veni, vidi, verba verti” (I came, I saw, I translated the words) .

The statement, written by senior engineer Jakob Uszkoreit, continued: “Today, we announce the first language translation system by which no native speakers now make use of: the Latin. Being but a few speak Latin daily, year by year more than a hundred thousand American students receive the National Latin Exam. Besides many people all over the world study Latin.”